One thing I  like to do is to make resources available to my staff to enable them the opportunity to continue to grow and expand their knowledge in longterm care and all the things that go with it. Some of these resources include books and dvds.  When I was starting out, my administrator / preceptor / mentor loaned me some books on leadership and management that he’d been reading.  It opened my eyes that there was a lot left to...

I was recently having a conversation with a family member over nursing home staffing.  He was very frustrated that the facility his mother was in would not put another CNA on her hall during the day.  He said that the staff was leaving because they were overloaded. This is a common concern with many families and many nursing home staff members and administrators as well.  What do you do when your budget doesn’t allow you to add...

There are so many wheelchair cushions out there today it can get a bit confusing on which one is the best for your residents.  You’ve got cushions made with eggcrate foam, memory foam, gel, air, water, sand, and everything in between.  As you know, for your residents who are already at risk for skin breakdown – they’re usually the ones who like to sit up for hours on end – a proper pressure reduction cushion is a...

For the past few years, everytime I took over a new facility, one of the first things I did was to distribute my BASICS MEMO to each and every employee and go through it with them in my first inservice.  Then, every new hire orientation had time set aside for me to personally sit down with new team members and go over the basics with them, too. The BASICS MEMO was compiled after having to troubleshoot many facilities and seeing the same...

  One of the first things I learned in the nursing home industry is that when you receive a referral, you’ve got to act quickly to capture it.  A typical scenario is that a discharge planner at a hospital either faxes out a referral to multiple facilities or uses an email referral distribution service such as e-Discharge to distribute the referral to multiple facilities. From the time you get this referral, you are competing...

One thing I try to do is to learn from my mistakes.  So, I’ll share some of my mistakes in this section called Lessons Learned so hopefully you can learn from them, too.  The lesson we’ll talk about today is about family members coming to take your resident out of the facility. This incident happened to me several years ago when I was first starting out. I was a new nursing home administrator working in one of my first...